The Real David Cameron

Will The Real David Cameron Please Stand Up

At the time of writing, David Cameron is heading down to Chequers for a session to plan the Tories’ strategy for the next election. Joining him will be party chairman Grant Shapps, the PM’s own political consultant Lynton Crosby (Australian right winger responsible for the party’s deeply unpleasant 2005 ‘Are you thinking what we’re thinking?’ election campaign) and chief of communications Craig Oliver (Andy Coulson’s replacement and this guy, as well as Chancellor George Osbourne.

There’s certainly a lot for them to discuss: since limping into office, the coalition which is keeping them in office has become increasingly fractious; even against the uninspiring opposition of the current Labour party the latest Guardian/ICM poll shows them 12 points behind, the biggest gap in a decade. Plus, we’re a month away from a budget while the British economy remains on the verge of having a cardiac arrest. The latest blow to fiscal recovery came earlier this week when the auctioning off of the 4G mobile licenses missed its projected total by more than £1 billion. More quietly — and potentially more seriously — recent chatter that the ratings agencies may strip Britain’s bonds of their AAA rating in 2013 continues. This would impact on how cheaply we could borrow money on the international markets, while sterling fell sharply again yesterday.

Nobody at Tory central office seems to be taking this stuff in hand. It’s not like Cameron’s party don’t have the PR man’s instinct running right through them from the very top; it just seems to completely desert them at odd times. Two cases this week illustrated this erratic judgement perfectly; Cameron’s trip to India was carefully stage managed around his visit to the site of the 1919 Amritsar massacre, and a very, very delicate effort to make the right noises about how hundreds of unarmed people being shot dead by British troops was a bit of a rum do, without actually saying sorry. Presumably this was so Dave could avoid the following day’s headline in the Mail saying something like ‘BRITAIN: NOW WE’RE APOLOGISING JUST FOR HAVING BEEN GREAT’ followed by Boris Johnson popping up in the Sun to write a centre page article pointing out that he actually thinks the British empire was a brilliant thing on the whole. So, well played, Cameron.

But the PM then got suckered into making a stupid, knee-jerk comment about a Hilary Mantel article that he almost certainly hadn’t read; Mantel’s long essay in the London Review of Books was about how, as has always been the case in history, the current royal princess is stripped of her personality, largely thanks to the media. The media obviously took this in the spirit it was intended and boiled their story down to ‘fat, bitter old crone hates beautiful young princess of hearts.’ In a vaguely grown up political culture, Cameron could have just said ‘I’ve not read the piece ­— didn’t really have the time to what with the day job, you know? ­— and besides, it’s none of my damn business what any artist chooses to think or say.’ But instead we got some deathly boilerplate about how Mantel’s comments were ‘Completely misguided and completely wrong’. When Ed Miliband pitched in later in the day saying that Middleton was ‘doing a brilliant job’, the urge to punch yourself in the balls became overwhelming. The whole thing was a perfect — and perfectly depressing — example of what ordinary people hate about modern politicians.

Every time that Cameron gets bogged down in some stupid sideshow like this (or this), it doesn’t detract attention from the big stories like they presumably hope: it just gives the impression that nobody’s actually taking charge of the deeply serious situation that this country is currently in. Our economy is still in the gutter, threatening a referendum on leaving Europe is putting foreign trade in jeopardy and austerity is starting to bite for the third year with apparently nothing to show for it. Gordon Brown briefly tried the ‘serious leader for serious times’ route a couple of years ago before his advisers panicked and got him to go back to feigning an interest in Susan Boyle. Maybe Shapps, Crosby and Oliver could reconsider that option. Whatever other ideas get bandied around at Chequers over the next few days, there’s a lot to be said for giving a bit of grown-up politics another try. Right now, the country needs it.